How do I recover lost picture files?

R

Ruby-Q

My friend had her computer on and connected to the internet all last night
and this morning all her pictures are gone. Wedding photos, everything. My
husband knows lots about computers but frankly, doesn't have the time to
address every body and their dogs computer problems. What advice should I
give her? A lot of times I think problems are more easily fixed than people
think, but they are just too lazy or scared to do anything when problems come
up. I'd be willing to educate myself, and herself about what to do, but where
do I begin? What info and detective clues do I need to get from her do we
need to start solving this issue?
 
B

Brian

Ruby-Q said:
My friend had her computer on and connected to the internet all last night
and this morning all her pictures are gone. Wedding photos, everything. My
husband knows lots about computers but frankly, doesn't have the time to
address every body and their dogs computer problems. What advice should I
give her? A lot of times I think problems are more easily fixed than people
think, but they are just too lazy or scared to do anything when problems come
up. I'd be willing to educate myself, and herself about what to do, but where
do I begin? What info and detective clues do I need to get from her do we
need to start solving this issue?
Click to expand...

You are in the wrong newsgroup here. This is for questions regarding the
Microsoft Access database package.

Anyway, the first place to look is in the recycle bin (it's on the desktop)
in case she accidentally deleted them.

If they ain't there, then she could try searching for one or more of them
(Start menu-->Search-->For Files and Folders). Why? Well, firstly, it's
not hard to accidentally drag an entire folder from where you last saw it to
somewhere else. Secondly, I had a problem where lots of stuff on my desktop
would regularly disappear (not everything, and not always the same stuff!).
Although the missing files were not in the Desktop folder, they DID show up
in a search, and when I opened one of the files from the Search window, they
would ALL magically reappear on the Desktop! I never did find out why this
happened, or prevent it. Note that it is VERY BAD IDEA to have anything on
your desktop except shortcuts.

Finally, she could try an undelete program. I used to use Norton Utilities,
but I'm sure there are others. However, she should STOP using the computer
until she does this, because the more she uses it, the more damaged any
deleted files are going to get, and the less chance there will be of
recovering them.

And, if she does get them back, tell her to BACK THEM UP!!! This is easiest
done to recordable CD's or DVD's. Computers can and do fail, and anyone
with valuable data (like wedding photos, fer cryin' out loud!) which is not
backed up is just begging to lose it. The disappearing files problem I
mentioned above eventually sorted itself out (kind of!) when the disk went
"clunk" one day and transformed itself into a piece of scrap. I lost
nothing except the price of a new disk and a few hours reloading, because
everything was backed up.
 
Top